Jury finds Va. Tech negligent in '07 shootings

Grafton Peterson, father of Erin Peterson, one of the victims of the April 16, 2007 fatal shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, takes the stand Friday, March 9, 2012 in Christiansburg, Va. President Charles Steger testified for two hours at a wrongful death trial brought by the families of two students killed during the April 16, 2007, campus attack. The civil suit claims university officials delayed warning the campus of the initial two shootings in a dormitory and then attempted to cover up their missteps. In the end, 33 people including the gunman were dead. (AP Photo/The Roanoke Times, Stephanie Klein-Davis)

CHRISTIANSBURG, Va. (AP) — A jury has found Virginia Tech negligent for delaying a campus warning of the first shootings in a 2007 campus massacre that left 33 dead.

Jurors returned the verdict Wednesday in a wrongful death civil suit brought by the parents of two students who were killed on April 16, 2007, in the most deadly mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Jurors deliberated for 3 ½ hours before awarding $4 million to each family, and the state immediately filed a motion to reduce the award. State law requires the award to be capped at $100,000.

The families of Erin Peterson and Julia Pryde said the two might be alive today if Virginia Tech police and administrators warned the campus of two shootings in a dorm 2 ½ hours before Seung-Hui Cho (sung wee joh) ended his killing spree, then killed himself.

Virginia Tech officials said they believed the first shootings were isolated.

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How can the jury hold the university guilty when it was first thought to be a murder/suicide. Then 2 1/2 hours later more people killed by a nut case. The only juries I know that hand down strange verdicts and/or give away large amounts of money are usually from liberal states like California.

James Madison, "Father of the Constitution" and chief author (1794): ""I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."

cwjjohn, the university, before the shootings, considered and rejected changes to the "gun free zone" laws that prohibited only law-abiding citizens from carrying their personal defense weapons on campus. The state legislature had also considered and rejected changes to the law. So, when a criminal broke the law, bringing his firearm onto the campus and began shooting people at random, no one had any legal means of self-defense. The university, and the state legislature members who voted against repealing the gun free zone laws, SHOULD have been held collectively, and individually, responsible for the deaths of each and every citizen who was lost as a result of their negligence (and that is the kindest thing one can say about such criminal behavior.)

IMHO, the school administrators, and the legislators who voted against repeal of the "gun free zone" law, should each have been held liable, in the amount of at least $4 million per death, for each of the 32 deaths caused by Mr. Cho. They violated those citizens' civil rights. And are responsible, IMHO for their wrongful deaths.

It is a matter of fact that where citizens have exercised their right to keep and bear arms, even when that right was unconstitutionally limited or restricted on a school campus, for example, they have been able to stop criminals who were bent on killing multiple persons in any shooting sprees on those campuses. At least once (Louisville KY) the vice principal of a school was able to stop a killer without firing a shot.